Luke and Jon

by Robert Williams

  When the final bell rang I found our small bus idling outside and climbed on. I saw Jon, sitting quietly, third row down, his face set. I sat down next to him and we watched the other kids walking past baaa-ing at the bus. I didn’t mention to him that I’d seen what’d happened in the corridor. And I didn’t tell him what Kieran Judd had said. We both stared out of the window of the half-empty bus as the town disappeared and the few country bumpkins got delivered back home at the end of the day.

  Wild, wooden and white

  Dad called me and Jon to the workroom. It was the unveiling. It was a dark windy evening and he’d lit candles and placed them around the room. The flames flickered and fell over and worked their way upright again as draughts swung through the outhouse. Shadows jumped and slid across the white walls and it felt special. It was the perfect atmosphere. The carving stood in the centre of the room covered in large dust sheets, and I was nervous. We hadn’t seen anything for a while. Dad, as usual, had become more secretive as he got close to finishing. He always was when he was working on a special piece of work. The carving had finally come together in the last couple of weeks and I hoped that it was as good as I wanted it to be. I was desperate not to be disappointed.

  He asked if we were ready and we both nodded. Jon stood behind me a little, as if he was unsure of what exactly lurked beneath the sheet and wanted that extra yard for protection. Dad carefully pulled away the covers and let them fall to the floor and I swear I heard Jon’s mouth drop open. The horse was stood on his hind legs with his front legs kicking high in the air. The hooves were higher than my head. His teeth were bared, his nostrils wide and his eyes wild. He was painted a dusty white, with grey flecks covering his shoulders, flanks and legs. Me and Jon stood and stared as the wind rattled the door and rushed through the gaps in the old stone walls.

  I wanted to tell him that it was fantastic. That it was brilliant and magnificent. I wanted to tell him that it was the best thing he’d ever done, that he was a genius. I didn’t say any of these things. In the end all I managed was, ‘It’s bloody ace.’ Jon pushed past me, all fear lost, and stood underneath the horse’s head and looked up and said, ‘It bloody is’, and my dad stood with a big, proud grin on his face and nodded. He knew that we were right.

  We all walked around him and looked from different angles. We stroked him and patted him, ran our hands down his legs and across his chest and slapped him and prodded him. Jon leant forward and nervously sniffed him. And then we stood back and stood still and just looked.

  Eventually Dad told us we should get back to the house. He went around the room and blew out the candles and covered the carving back up. He locked the door behind us and we trooped to the kitchen. Dad made us tea and toast and told us he was going to start taking it to the forest as soon as he got chance. He looked relaxed. He looked like he had finished a tough job and finished it well. We spoke about how good it would look and how shocked people would be when they found him, rearing up on his hind legs, miles from anywhere, deep in the trees. I could see people approaching cautiously, gently touching him like we had done, and then laughing and looking around for a clue: who had put him there and why? And then, when they found nothing, they would shake their heads and reluctantly carry on their walk. Leaving the carving behind and looking over their shoulder as they headed out of the clearing and back into the gloom and darkness of the forest. Checking that he really is there, that they really had just stumbled across a massive wooden horse deep in the middle of nowhere.

  Jon stayed late, even though it was school the next day. We talked about possible future plans and future carvings, and then, when Jon couldn’t keep his eyes open any longer, we drove him home down the fell lane. Because it was so dark Dad insisted on taking Jon to the end of the lane, to his doorstep, and as we approached the car headlights lit up the house, illuminating the junk in the front yard and the newspaper-covered windows – the shabbiness. Jon jumped out as soon as the car pulled to a stop and shot around the back of the house. Dad stayed put with the engine ticking over and the headlights shining. ‘Jon lives here?’ he asked.

  I nodded and said, ‘With his grandparents.’

  ‘Jesus,’ Dad said, ‘It’s worse than our place.’

  He turned the car around and we drove back up the lane. As we travelled up the steep track the headlights shone out across the fields and lit them a bed-sheet white and I looked up at the sky. The stars glinted like pin heads in the black sky and I thought it impossible that they were burning suns. Dad followed my eyes and when we got out of the car we both stood and stared up into the cold sky for ages until my teeth started to chatter and I couldn’t hide it any more and Dad laughed and dragged me inside.

  And then the letter came

  My life changed the split second Brian Stuart’s lorry shattered Mum’s car. Everything previous to that moment is before and everything else is after. The walk home is a strange limbo time but if I had to choose I would put it in the after category. Everything had changed; it’s just that I hadn’t been told. When I think about myself walking the hour-long walk home I’m furious with that person for not knowing, for not working it out somehow. For not knowing that everything had changed. But there was no way I could know until I walked into our house to see my dad sitting in his chair with a look on his face that I will never forget. There was no warning shot and there were no sirens. There should have been a sign painted across the sky telling me my life had changed for ever. But there was nothing. The flowers still stood in the garden and my key still fitted the lock. I walked down the hallway, like I had done a thousand times before, only this time every step took me closer to the end of my old life and the start of a new one that I didn’t want. I didn’t learn from this though. It didn’t teach me anything. I thought that was my big moment, my life’s tragedy, and I got sloppy and I relaxed and I wasn’t prepared when I should have been.

  I was home from school and I threw my bag down in the kitchen as usual and idly picked up the letter that was left lying on the corner of the table and read that new information has come to light and due to this information available to us we need to re-examine the records and statements and see if we arrive at the same conclusions. I read that they would need to speak to Mr Gerald Redridge and a meeting had been arranged for Wednesday the 15th at 11 a.m. I read that they did understand that this would be upsetting for all parties concerned and they apologised for this upset caused. They hoped that he understood that they were trying to establish the facts of the tragic road-traffic accident that occurred on Crofts Bank Road on April the 11th of this year. They said that another inquest would be held at a date yet to be decided. I didn’t understand. What was to be investigated? What new information and how did it matter? She was dead. Brian Stuart was dead. There was nothing left to investigate.

  And then I thought of my dad. He would have got home from dropping me at school at around 8.45 as usual. The letter would have probably been waiting in the hallway and he normally opened the post before he went to his workroom. I counted the hours in my head: one two three four five six seven hours and ten minutes since he’d read it. I listened carefully to the house. It sounded empty.

  I tried to be hopeful; I checked the workroom first. It hadn’t been unlocked. I walked back to the house, heading for his bedroom. I didn’t rush. His bedroom door was open and I could see him from the landing – I could see the lower half of his legs lying stock still on the bed. Shoes still on. I took a deep breath and walked two steps into the room. He was lying face down, spread-eagled on the bed, arms hanging over the sides. The room smelt of whisky and damp. I walked over to the bed and sat down on the edge, next to his head. His back rose and fell an inch. I was about to walk away, to let him sleep it off, when he turned to me and said, ‘Hello, Luke.’ He put his arm around my neck and pulled me down to the bed and we lay side by side. The room darkened quickly and he fell asleep.

  It was midnight. We were sat at the kitchen table. We both had a coffee. He was exp
laining. ‘Your mum had stopped taking the lithium.’ He blinked and looked at me.

  ‘So?’

  ‘Well, the lithium kept her stable, didn’t it?’

  ‘It kept her quiet,’ I said.

  He nodded. ‘It did, but it also controlled the highs and lows, didn’t it? When she was on the lithium she was never manic and she never …’

  He smiled and shook his head and said, ‘Crashed.’

  I asked if he’d known that she’d stopped taking the pills but he shook his head.

  ‘It’s only come out now. Dr Hanson was on leave at the time of the accident and the inquest, but when he came back he heard about it all, and checked his files and found out that your mum hadn’t picked up her prescription for a couple of week before the accident.’

  ‘So what are they thinking?’ I asked. I knew what they were thinking. But I wanted him to say it, so the words were spoken and out and in the air. I wanted to hear exactly what they sounded like, to experience their journey from his mouth to my ear.

  He sighed and said, ‘They think that if she’d stopped taking the lithium, she may have been depressed, and if she was depressed she may have caused the crash deliberately.’

  I said it. ‘They think it was suicide.’

  My dad nodded.

  ‘Yes, they think it might be suicide.’

  It wasn’t

  I didn’t think it was suicide. I knew it wasn’t. She might have stopped taking the lithium but she wasn’t depressed. I could spot the signs of depression. They were obvious to me. Dad had lived with it longer and it was instinctive to him. He could tell by the way she walked in a room or he would notice the tension across her back as she filled the kettle. He would see that she was wearing a top with a stain on the right sleeve two days on the run and he would know it was back. We had seen depression. We had seen her in bed, white and thin and clinging hard to the sheets. We had worried and fussed and been told to go away, to leave her alone. So we had sat downstairs and looked up at the ceiling and stopped on the stairs and watched the closed bedroom door and listened for a sign that she was coming out of the blackness. Silence was bad. And it could last for days. Any sound was good – the sound of the shower, the sound of wardrobe doors being opened. It didn’t matter what, it meant she was moving, it meant she had won again.

  But she wasn’t depressed the day she died. The morning of the crash had been a normal ‘good’ morning. I came down to the kitchen, late as usual. Mum made me eat some cereal, which turned soggy before I got halfway through it. She told me not to forget my art folder and then flapped and hurried me into the car. Dad came out of his workroom with a cup of coffee and waved us both off. Mum sang along to a rubbish song on the radio and I pretended I was embarrassed. She checked I had my lunch money and kissed me before I climbed out of the car. As I walked away I saw her lean forward and turn the radio back up and she waved goodbye, mouthing she would pick me up later, blew me a kiss and drove off, waving as she went. There wasn’t a drop of depression anywhere near her that day.

  But, of course, the police didn’t know any of that. The only facts they had were that Megan Redridge was in a massive car crash and died. And that Megan Redridge suffered from bipolar disorder and had stopped taking her medication at least two weeks before the crash. They also knew that both vehicles involved were tested and neither had any discernible faults. And they needed to know which file to put my mum’s death in: Accident or Suicide.

  P.P.P.P.P.P.Painting

  Painting helped. If I look back I can see that even when my mum was alive I painted more when things were looking bad. When the storm clouds gathered around her and she started spinning out of control, I painted. In the aftermath – the long, dark, quiet days, when she was locked away in her room – I painted. I painted and drew during better days too, when everything was settled and calm, but it wasn’t as focused. It didn’t drain my energy and absorb my thoughts like it sometimes did. And to be honest, the work, well, it wasn’t as good. It lacked tension I suppose.

  Since we’d moved to Duerdale I’d done nothing much but paint. I was more consistent these days too and more often than not the paintings developed as I expected and wanted them to. At times it felt like I was in complete control of shade, shadow and line. And it felt good. When it’s going well, it’s both an intense and a calm experience at the same time. It’s exciting. It’s surprising how quickly you can ruin a painting though. One minute it’s all going down exactly as it should and the next, you’ve gone too far and can’t get it back. The trick is not to get too excited, even when things are going well. My dad told me that when carving or painting you have to take charge, that there has always got to be an element of control. And he’s right. People have this idea that an artist can be wild and abandoned and fling the paint on the canvas and throw it around like it doesn’t matter. Well, you can be confident and bold, but you have to take responsibility, you have to take care. You can’t be hasty or dismissive or it will show in the finished painting. It will look rushed and somehow, in some way, it won’t look right. I’ve found that what works for me is to try and trick myself into thinking that I’m not really there. I imagine that it isn’t my arm or my hand. I imagine that I’m watching someone else mix the paint together and if the painting is emerging as it should, then I try to remove myself from the process as much as possible.

  I had moved on from painting the cairn at the top of Bowland Fell, but the fell was still my main hunting ground. I painted wind-blasted trees, abandoned derelict barns and ice-cold, slate-grey streams. And all these paintings had one constant. They were all filled with the strange light I’d only ever found on top of Bowland Fell. It cast the tree as a suspicious silhouette against the sky and it twinkled threateningly in the breath-stealing cold water of the streams. Even on the increasingly rare warmer days there was a hint of menace in the light up there. It changed in a second, sometimes almost disappearing, and what minutes before had been a clear view of leafless trees and long, low, dry-stone walls would suddenly become dark and murky and abstract. The light on Bowland Fell lit things in a brutal, fascinating way and added drama to each painting. I told my dad about it and he nodded and said, ‘That’s northern light’, and even though we had only moved an hour further north I think he was right; it was a different light. My room was almost full of finished canvases and I had to store some in the workroom alongside Dad’s carvings. He helped me take them down and hang them on the walls and when we were finished he looked around him and said, ‘You’re good at this, you know.’ I tried not to let him see me grinning.

  I had less luck at DHS. I asked my floral-frocked art teacher, Mrs Richmond, when I could do some painting. She replied that this term we were concentrating on ceramics. I said that she misunderstood – I wanted to know when I could go to the art room outside of lessons to paint. She eyed me suspiciously, as if I was intent on causing trouble. She told me the art room was kept locked when there wasn’t a teacher present. I asked if I was able to paint after school, but she was starting to get impatient now. She told me that there was no need to worry, that for the last ten years she’d managed to teach the whole syllabus in the allotted class hours. She said I wouldn’t miss out on anything. I gave up. I decided I would stick to Bowland Fell and its menacing light. She could keep her dingy art room.

  Well-being

  They were pinpoint attacks. They happened in dark corners of quiet corridors. Always when no one else was around. Always finished with a spit in the face. Jon said the knife was never used, but he was shown it a couple of times. Just so he knew: this is what is happening; this is what could happen. The shoves and kicks and slaps I saw in the corridor didn’t even register any more with Jon. They were just passing storm clouds and they happened all the time. Kieran Judd was the nightmare in dark corners with the knife settled in his pocket, sunk into the shadows, his fists and feet itching. Jon tried to shrug it away, as if it was a part of life, like headaches and homework. And it was clear why. The at
tempted visits from the Social Services were happening almost daily now so Jon treated this stuff as an inconvenience, a fly to be swatted away. Letters were being hand-delivered and Jon had started opening them. They would be coming, the letters said. With or without agreement. To speak to Mr and Mrs Mansfield, to speak to Jon Mansfield. To assess their well-being.

  Jon carried on, head down, putting up no resistance to Judd’s feet and fists. I’d seen kids at my old school crumble under less. It was different there though, they were serious and there was a message: BULLYING IN ANY FORM WILL NOT BE TOLERATED. They even stopped using the word bullying and used words you normally only hear on the news or in police dramas: harassment, persecution, assault, attack.